THE FOOL KILLER (1965) in 16mm

(Servando Gonzalez, 1965, 99 min, 16mm)

Appalachian folklore tells of an eight-foot-tall wanderer who stalks hills and hollers in search of fools to rid from the earth with a swing of his axe. In Servando Gonzalez’s eccentric picaresque THE FOOL KILLER (1965), this mythical figure takes the form of Milo Bogardus (Anthony Perkins), a charismatic but volatile amnesiac Civil War veteran who takes impressionable 12-year-old runaway George Mellish (Edward Albert) under his wing. Rambling freely in the untamed Southern wilds between Huckleberry Finn, Flannery O’Connor, and Charles Laughton’s NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, Gonzalez’s uncanny adventure tale evokes the wonders, temptations, and terrors of childhood; it also stands as a chronicle of the psychic distress, religious fervor, and social disorder of the Reconstruction era, a remarkable feat of insight for a Mexican auteur making his only American feature. THE FOOL KILLER’s bold visual stylization and the unpredictable tonality of Gustavo César Carrión’s score reflect the instability of both the protagonists and their milieu, as well as the freedom offered by the film’s independent production. Released to incomprehension, indifference, and scorn in its own time, THE FOOL KILLER today stands as much more than a forgotten curio–it’s a vivid, singular, and unforgettable work of American mythical cinema, ripe for rediscovery.

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